Mediterranean Diet Cuts Risk of Deadly Type of Breast Cancer

Health benefits of eating a Mediterranean Diet are many, ranging from reduced risk of heart disease, certain cancers and diabetes to prevention against mental conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

Now much evidence has come to light revealing how eating this diet which consists of primarily plant-based foods, such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes and nuts, as well as healthy fats such as olive oil and canola oil, can benefit our health.

Eating a mediterranean diet could mitigate the risk of getting one deadly types of breast cancer, suggests a new study. This type of diet could helps in cutting the risk of oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer by about 40 percent, claims the study.

In the study, the mediterranean style diet – which lacks white bread, red meat, refined sugars and saturated fat and consists of an abundance of fresh fruits and veggies, nuts, fish and olive oil – found to substantially reduce the odds of getting oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer in postmenopausal women.

For the study, lead researcher Professor Piet van den Brandt, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and colleagues included 62,573 women and tracked their diets over two decades to determine how closely they followed the Mediterranean style diet.

A total of 3,354 women contracted breast cancer during the course of the study. They found that women, aged between 55 and 69, who ate a mediterranean style diet had far lower chances of developing the aforementioned aggressive form of the breast cancer.

Overall, those who adhered most closely to this plant-based diet were at a 40 percent decreased risk of oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer.

He said: “Our research can help to shine a light on how dietary patterns can affect our cancer risk.

“We found a strong link between the Mediterranean diet and reduced oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer risk among post-menopausal women, even in a non-Mediterranean population.”

“This important study showed that following a dietary pattern like the Mediterranean Diet, could help reduce breast cancer risk – particularly the subtype with a poorer prognosis. With breast cancer being so common in the UK, prevention is key if we want to see a decrease in the number of women developing the disease,” added Dr Panagiota Mitrou, director of research funding at the charity World Cancer Research Fund, which funded the study. “We would welcome further research that helps us better understand the risk factors for the different breast cancer subtypes.”

The study findings are published in the International Journal of Cancer.